Everybody has their own view on the Academy Awards, anything from thinking of it as "that show where actors get on stage and say funny things" to "that thing that snubbed The Dark Knight and Star Wars" and everything in between. The truth is, there's a lot more to the Academy Awards than most people think.

First held in 1929, The Oscars (formerly the Academy Awards, until the name was officially changed in 2013) are an annually held, televised Award Show, dedicated to honoring the best films and filmmakers of any given year, with a focus on Hollywood and other facets of the American film industry, though a prestigious "Best Foreign Film" award exists, and occasionally a foreign film (such as Michael Haneke's Amour in 2012) will sneak its way into a Best Picture nomination. Though there are several other award shows of its type, most famously the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, The Oscars are by far the most popular and well-known. Due largely to their popularity, receiving an Oscar is incredibly prestigious; it's generally considered the highest honor one can receive for filmmaking.

The award's purpose was originally to encourage better filmmaking, as well as promote the industry. The Academy is not actually a school, but a collection of people in the film industry that is dedicated to the advancement of films. Again, The Oscar was meant to help that along.

The awards often receive flak from more nerdy audiences for largely paying attention to smaller dramas in favour of larger, big-budget films. This largely began in 1977, when Star Wars lost Best Picture to Annie Hall. Since then, it's been rare for the top-grossing film of a given year to also get nominated for (let alone win) the top honor. Many see little to no problem with this inclination, while others fervently believe the Sci Fi Ghetto is at fault and that the Oscars are dominated by showy films designed solely to win awards, something that has been dubbed "Oscar Bait".

Any time the awards are brought up, expect somebody to mention Award Snub. That a film someone likes didn't win is one of the most-discussed aspects of the Awards; even years later, many are still sore over their favourites losing out to what they see as an inferior film.

Mostly, it's another Award Show — albeit the most famous. For tropes about the award presenting show itself, see Academy Awards Ceremonies.
As of 2015, The Oscars awards the following twenty-four awards each year:

Best Picture

Best Directing

Best Actor in a Leading Role

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Best Actress in a Leading Role

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Best Animated Feature

Best Animated Short Film

Best Cinematography

Best Costume Design

Best Documentary Feature

Best Documentary Short Subject

Best Film Editing

Best Foreign Language Film

Best Live Action Short Film

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Best Original Score

Best Original Song

Best Production Design

Best Sound Editing

Best Sound Mixing

Best Visual Effects

Best Adapted Screenplay

Best Original Screenplay

The following are some specific historical retrospectives concerning certain practices of the academy:

There was no "Best Picture Award" given, but instead, two oddly redundant awards—Most Outstanding Production, which went to Wings, and Most Unique and Artistic Quality of Production, which went to Sunrise. After that first ceremony the Unique and Artistic Quality award was discontinued and a single Best Production Award was instituted, with the name later changed to Best Picture. Wings is often listed as the sole "Best Picture" winner at the first ceremony. (Both categories are included in the list below).

Winners were announced in advance, for the only time.

Runner-up awards were given, for the only time.

An award for Best Title Writing was given out. With the silent film era rapidly drawing to a close, the award was never given again.

Two Best Director awards were given, one for drama and one for comedy. Starting with the second Oscars only one directing award was given out.

For each of the first three Academy Awards, the Best Actor and Best Actress awards were given for the best body of work within a year, rather than for an individual performance.

There were no nominees for the second ceremony. The nominees later listed are unofficial, taken from people and works that the Academy considered.

In the 2009 Oscars, the late Heath Ledger won Best Supporting Actor for The Dark Knight, a first for a superhero film, and sparking a debate about whether Dead Artists Are Better. Ledger was only the second actor to win a posthumous Oscar, the first being Peter Finch, Best Leading Actor, who won at the 1977 ceremony for Network. Curiously, both actors were Australian.

As evidenced by The Return Of The King's sweep, the Academy is willing to give a serious look to genre films as worthy of the Academy's highest honors in writing and directing in addition to the technical awards which such films can usually garner (although the fact The Lord of the Rings had such a significant pedigree before being adapted probably didn't hurt matters much). Although the Academy was knocked for not awarding the first two films in the trilogy similar honors, King's sweep is almost universally considered a recognition of the complete trilogy, as opposed to simply one film.

Animated works have also undergone a major transformation. Back when studios still had theater cartoons, the Animated Short Subject feature was an award which studios clamored for. These days, animated works are most likely to be avant-garde subjects which most people are unlikely to ever see (unless, of course, the studio that produced them later becomes very famous) aside from the festival circuit. A Best Animated Film category was introduced in 2001 that allowed high-profile cartoons such as Shrek and Toy Story 3 a chance to be honored without the potential "embarrassment" of an animated film being nominated for Best Picture, as Disney's Beauty and the Beast was in the early 1990s.

Since 1945, the Best Picture Oscar has gone to the film that simply received the most votes; starting with the 2010 Academy Awards, the Academy returned to the original voting format: voters rank the nominated films from best to worst, and then the votes will be tallied up to determine which film wins the award. One could argue that this was done to ensure that all of the nominated films will be on a level playing field and (along with the extra five nominations) help to placate the people who complained about the Best Picture snubs from the 2009 awards.

The award for Best Documentary Feature has also suffered from having a rather strange definition — documentaries can be disqualified for airing on TV too soon as well as for involving the use of too much archival footage. This says nothing about the fact that until Bowling for Columbine won in 2002, it was fairly rare for any Academy Award-winning documentaries to be available to the common public at all. Five of the six winners before Bowling for Columbine all involved Jews being killed as a result of antisemitism. Not That There's Anything Wrong with That (the films that is, not antisemitism), but people would raise eyebrows if this were the topic of the Best Picture nominee with that kind of frequency. Before that, there was the Hoop Dreamssnub of 1994.

Since Bowling for Columbine, though, the award has come under the same scrutiny as most other major categories, and most winners, while not all are as famous as An Inconvenient Truth or March of the Penguins, can usually be found at your local video store.

The nature of the category also allows for some oddities, such as installments of non-American television series being nominated as long as the documentaries haven't aired in the US; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation current affairs program The Fifth Estate received several such nominations as a result.

The Foreign Language film category is also notorious for extremely complicated rules and a country can only submit one film to the Academy for nomination consideration. It's also subject to the rules about television airings; Japan wanted to submit Shall We Dance? in 1997, but it had already had a TV airing in its home country and was disqualified. (They submitted Princess Mononoke instead; it didn't get a nomination.)

Until 2010, no woman had ever won the Best Director award. Kathryn Bigelow was the first, winning for The Hurt Locker — beating out her ex-husband, James Cameronnote Cameron had already won three Oscars for Titanic (1997). (for Avatar) in the process.

As of 2013, AMPAS has retired the name "Academy Awards", referring to the ceremony only as "The Oscars". It also, at least for the 2013 awards, no longer numbers the ceremony.

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